Overload of Sounds in todays Raids

I started this thread on the official EU forums and I hope that I could get some support from the mmo-community!

Hello,

I'm sure many players (mainly melee) would tend to agree with me here:

Being in melee in a 25man (even 10man) raid totally overloads you with sounds.
Be be it arrows of hunters wizzing by, arcane missiles from mages or even the constant growling and moaning of the other players around me. While this would all help make a cool sound environment it is HIGHLY overloaded.

Why don't you just CTRL+S you may suggest now. But wait, there's more!
I, for one, immensely enjoy the bosses and all their lovingly recorded dialogue and voice snippets they have. Especially the Sha of Fear has done it to me. His voice acting is awesome.
Unfortunately, I rarely get to hear ANY of it with all the sound overload going on which sucks.

It has driven me as far as to go and "mute" specific abilities one by one by placing (I checked, it's not against ToS as I'm not modifying any game files) empty .ogg/.wav files in my WoW installations Data\Sound\ folder to get some quiet.

This has given me some peace and quiet and I can truly enjoy all the bosses have to say and even understand what they say (Acutally, all sounds but the VERY annoying Rogue Ability Shadow Blade ability which i haven't been able to pinpoint to this very day).
It also allows me to record (Fraps) our first heroic kills in a way where the viewer can hear the bosses as well instead of just my mouthbreathing and the general TS yapping going on

But should I really have to be doing this? Vanilla - WotLK had a Sound at Camera mode. That let me only play sounds that were heard at where my camera was. This was for no known reason removed in Cataclysm.

What I'd really like from the Devs is another Option to let me regulate Boss Emotes/Sounds only. We currently have Master Volume, Music, Ambience and Sound Volume. Just add a Boss Volume there so I can just shut the others down and ONLY hear bosses.

I'd love to hear from other people if they feel the same way or if I'm really just the odd one out of the bunch.

Love,

Megafail

P.s: There's an Addon that plays back Sound emotes based upon the Yell messages but that doesn't always work (especially with new encounters or emotes that are not transmitted via text): BossFilter.

At times, when there's too many things happening at once, my sound will automatically go mute. It's not the earbuds or my computer as this has happened on all computers I've owned. With too many sound effects it either mutes them all for a few seconds or drastically reduces the volume until I change my position or until things settle down.

I like having sound, helps my tunnel-visioned brain notice DBM notifications better, but when you add that to the multiple shouts, grunts, pally abilities, DK abilities, warrior abilities, etc. It's damn near impossible to concentrate.

Even while questing Blizzard seem to have made their voice acting much quieter than all ambient noises so it is hard to hear what anyone is saying.
They really should separate the two onto Sound and Speech sliders.

There are some nice packages that will help you mute sounds. They basically create an empty sound file for each annoying sound in the game. So when the sound is played its replaced with nothing. It makes life a lot better for me as a melee.

As a HC raider for 2 years i never had sounds for WoW turned on. Never needed it. Nothing but a distraction.

sound maybe a distraction, but it can also be a huge help. Especially where boss emotes are concerned as they are almost always tied into a special ability, Phase change etc.

Nuclear weapons: A firm public commitment to build the £100bn renewal of the Trident weapons system, followed by an equally firm private commitment not to build it. They’re secret submarines, no one will ever know. It’s a win win.

sound maybe a distraction, but it can also be a huge help. Especially where boss emotes are concerned as they are almost always tied into a special ability, Phase change etc.

Sorry iv never had a problem noticing these things since im always looking on my screen. Raiding hardmodes since i started till i ended i never found a time when sound was needed as either bossmods or me paying attention told me everything i needed to know.

I enjoy sounds in my games, the only time I turn them off is when I'm listening to music. I don't see why some people play a game with the sound off and consider it an annoyance. You're just missing out on a good chunk of the game's meat. It's fine if it annoys you, but we're not all like that. Game devs make games with sound effects for a reason, obviously, so it's not a reasonable suggestion to tell everyone to just turn the sound off.

Cool suggestion, I must say I personally would use that mode if it was available, but I’d still like to have the option to hear the sounds of my own spells and abilities in addition to the boss.

So murloc here is going to keep running and forward this to the devs (and I haven’t even broken a sweat!). We’ll see what their take on this is, maybe this is a particular design decision where they didn’t want for this to happen or maybe it’s a technical limitation of some sort or… if we’re lucky, they might agree with it and one day you might remember this as the Megafail sound option!
Like always, thanks for caring and for helping us improve our game. If there’s any news on the subject I’ll let you know. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

I would love this, I could actually play the game with sound if they separated speech from ambient sound. It does suck that I don't get to hear anything of the boss voices but the sound of casting and melee is far too annoying to turn on just for that sake.

Originally Posted by Bigbamboozal

Intelligence is like four wheel drive, it's not going to make you unstoppable, it just sort of tends to get you stuck in more remote places.

Originally Posted by MerinPally

If you want to be disgusted, next time you kiss someone remember you've got your mouth on the end of a tube which has shit at the other end, held back by a couple of valves.